Appeal No. 2003-1272 Page 25
Application No. 10/039,338
provided with a plurality of circle or even point contacts does not, in and of itself, provide
any indication that the Jordan bristles will puncture golf turf or do damage to the turf
surface being walked on, as the majority seems to imply.
It cannot be disputed that anticipation is established only when a single prior art
reference discloses, expressly or under the principles of inherency, each and every
element of a claimed invention. See RCA Corp. v. Applied Digital Data Sys., Inc., 730
F.2d 1440, 1444, 221 USPQ 385, 388 (Fed. Cir. 1984). In other words, there must be
no difference between the claimed invention and the reference disclosure, as viewed by
a person of ordinary skill in the field of the invention. Scripps Clinic & Research Found.
v. Genentech Inc., 927 F.2d 1565, 1576, 18 USPQ2d 1001, 1010 (Fed. Cir. 1991). It is
not necessary that the reference teach what the subject application teaches, but only
that the claim read on something disclosed in the reference, i.e., that all of the
limitations in the claim be found in or fully met by the reference. Kalman v. Kimberly
Clark Corp., 713 F.2d 760, 772, 218 USPQ 781, 789 (Fed. Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 465
U.S. 1026 (1984).
It is certainly also true that, in order to establish a case of anticipation under
principles of inherency, when a reference is silent about an asserted inherent
characteristic, it must be clear that the missing descriptive matter is necessarily present
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